Friday, May 8, 2009

Well, we have now completed the first week of May's Eating From the Pantry Challenge. During the month of May my goal is to eat more from our pantry and cut my grocery and household spending to $160.

This week we really didn't do as well as I had hoped. We had a crazy week where we wound up eating out one night and getting some snacks out another night ($18.57) and we did do some grocery shopping ($30.87). Plus I picked up some diapers for Pumpkin ($23.02). Our total household spending this week was $72.46 which only leaves us with $87.54 for the rest of the month. I'm thinking we aren't going to make this. We're one week in and I've already spent almost half the budget. Ugh!

Tomorrow I will be going to Costco and I'm thinking that after that trip we will only venture to the store for milk, bread and produce. If I can stick with that we just might make it. Of course I'll also need to make sure that we don't exceed our 2 gallon of milk a week limit. Last night we spent $3.49 for a gallon of milk which I can get at Costco for approximately $2.29. It killed me, but we were completely out of milk.

I have to say that I am amazed at the price differences I am finding between Costco and the local grocery stores. I know that there are still some items that I could get cheaper by buying them at the grocery store when they're on sale and I have a coupon, but that got to be such a hassle. We no longer have the grocery ads delivered to our house so I have to check all the sales online. We have 6 different grocery stores within a 5 mile radius of our house. It takes way too much time to check all those ads online. Then factor in time to match up the sales to coupons and then finally deciding which store to hit. It just isn't worth it. So for the rest of May I'm going to try sticking with shopping at Costco, the produce stand and drug stores. We'll see how it goes.

Now I need to go work on my menu plan for the rest of the month. I need to figure out just what items we need before I hit Costco tomorrow.

Head over to Learning The Frugal Life to see how she is doing with the May Eating From the Pantry Challenge and to find links to the other participants in this challenge. Do you think you're up to the challenge of eating from your pantry this month? If so, join us.

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It is amazing the price difference between stores. We have lots of different places to grocery shop within a few miles of me also. Wal-Mart, Target, Hy-Vee, Fareway, Dahl's and they all have price differences. Maybe starting a price book would help you out. It takes some work initially but it has really helped me. I wrote a post about it here if you want to check it out.

I have a lot of target prices in my head so I know how much I want to spend on most of the items that we use regularly. That's why I was so upset about the price we paid for milk, but it was past my daughter's bed time and she was cranky. It wasn't worth driving aroung to save a dollar. It was more of a bad planning moment then anything else. Heck, this has been a bad planning week for me.